Double trumple

By David McCulloch,
Account Executive
04/10/2017

Twitter recently announced it’ll be doubling its character limit from 140 to 280. Languages such as Japanese, Chinese and Korean can convey double the amount of information per character than languages such as English, Spanish or French. Only 0.4% of Japanese tweets hit the character limit, compared to 9% of English and are less impacted by ‘cramming’ – being forced to edit to fit that unbending 140 characters. The upping of the limit is intended to level the playing field.

As might be expected, the reaction on Twitter has been mixed, with many saying what users really need is an edit button and better control of trolls. Others are saying it’s a welcome change and keeps the brevity Twitter’s known for, but without the need to cram.

We’ll have to wait a little while to see how well this change is accepted, but of course the bonus is that we now have more characters to debate it.